On Demand Marketing Campaigns on AWS
Marketing is the most strategic activity for any organisation that has a product or a service to sell. As any successful marketer will endorse, an intelligent online presence is a pre-requisite for a successful campaign. To ensure the success of a campaign, a systematic planning process needs to be applied. So typically, in order to launch a product successfully, the team needs to chart out a roadmap for the activity – starting with the IT infrastructure requirement (software and hardware) for a website. The servers, storage, hosting space required, networking equipment or applications and robust databases that would drive the campaign usually top the list of requirements, as well as costs.
Budget discussions follow in order that the procurement process can be eased into the timeline. These usually take the course according to the management policies. In most organisations the whole process takes between 4 to 8 weeks. This is usually the lead time for a good marketing campaign launch from ground up.
But once it is launched, the life of a campaign is much shorter. During the planning period as well as post the launch, there is always an inherent wastage of resources, since the infrastructure needn't operate at 100% all the time. This, wastage of course, translates into costs. In addition, once launched, there will be business peaks and troughs, and these may be an added cost. Peaks- because extra servers is required which needs to be accurately forecasted and provisioned for, and troughs because it adds resources idle cost.
In order to fight these challenges of cost, time, scalability and security, a cloud based web infrastructure is just what is needed. It seamlessly connects users at the lowest possible cost, ensuring speed, ease and economies of scale. In one real life engagement, with the help of the cloud, the time for launching the website reduced seven times while the annual cost was cut by 60%. That is the impact of a change to the cloud for launching a marketing campaign.
The advantages that the cloud platform offers to a marketing campaign activity are numerous. It allows for a high level of automation that drastically reduces costs, helping deploy new infrastructure in as little as 48 hours (as against an earlier 4 weeks program), and hence at a fraction of the cost. The cost advantage of the pay per use model or that offers on-demand capacity is a big part of the advantage too.. With costs savings at every step, the AWS cloud ensures stability of the infrastructure with no user disruption issues even for peak loads of usage. Additional computing capacity can be seamlessly provisioned for on the cloud, with the promise of a compliant and secure environment.
The support that CSS Corp offers to the cloud provided by AWS translates into additional advantages over the basic marketing platform – which is essentially about a marketing environment needed for hosting websites. Fast, robust and able to meet peak business demands, the marketing platform on AWS can be monitored on a continuous basis to ensure the highest threat mitigation abilities. With the cost savings it ensures, using the AWS cloud for marketing campaign activities can be the first step towards a successful campaign, one that has already started saving costs!
